the story of a grown man struggling against his
lover's possessive son has the built -in volatility of a
commercial-film premise, yet the Duplasses' sensitiv-
ity, which is genuine, is too soft for the situation they
have set up. The movie is tame, and Tomei's earth
mother, who tries to make everyone happy, is rather
condescendingly conceived.-David Denby (Reviewed
in our issue of 6/14 & 21/10.) (In wide release.)
DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS
Jay Roach's remake of Francis Veber's 1998 comedy
"The Dinner Game" burdens its antics-regarding so-
phisticates who hold soirées that feature fools for them
to mock-with a framework of corporate chicanery
and art-world pretension. The results are tediously
busy and dishearteningly bland. Paul Rudd is under-
utilized as a financial analyst striving for a promotion
that, he hopes, will convince his girlfriend (Stephanie
Szostak), to marry him. His ooss is hosting the title
dinner, and the analyst's life is savaged by the blun-
derer he snares. As that blunderer, a naïve loser whose
hobby involves dioramas displaying stuffed mice, Steve
Carell seems constrained by the plot's many moving
parts. As a priapic artist, Jemaine Clement (the lus-
trous villain in "Gentlemen Broncos") is overwhelmed
by the noisy and slapdash proceedings. A handful of
funny lines and loopy inventions don't compensate for
mechanistic comedy that seems ready-made for a laugh
track, and the splendid performers all but cry out for
a firmer directorial hand (even the funny bits are care-
lessly filmed) and a tighter balance of the plausible
and the ridiculous.-Richard Brody (In wide release.)
ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLONDE-HAIRED GIRL
This recession-age fable, which revolves around love,
work, family pressures, and hidebound traditions, is
set in contemporary Lisbon but breathes the air of a
dreamy, timeless romanticism-4)ne that befits the long
view of life taken by its hundred-year-old director,
Manoel de Oliveira. The story, told in flashbacks, is
framed by a train ride to a rural resort where Macário
(Ricardo Trêpa) is going to recover from a shattered
affair; he chooses to unburden himself to the stranger
seated beside him. This quiet listener, played by Le-
onor Silveira-Oliveira's muse for the last two of his
eight decades in cinema-begins the proceedings with
a screen-piercing stroke of genius that turns a cliché
into a marvel. Macário pours out his tale of working
as an accountant at his uncle's fabric shop and fall-
ing in love, from a distance and at first sight, with a
coy young woman (Catarina Wallenstein) who's look-
ing out a window across the street. She turns out to
be a wealthy heiress, her house a lavish villa, and her
cultural milieu one of great refinement and greater
cruelty. Oliveira brings a dry, sensual elegance to this
story of hearts confounded by circumstances and si-
lences, and he portrays social formalities as mating
rituals for human animals on the verge of brutality.
In Portuguese.-R.B. (Anthology Film Archives.)
THE EXTRA MAN
A precious youth named Louis Ives (Paul Dano), fired
from his teaching position after an unfortunate inci-
dent with a brassiere, arrives in Manhattan and finds
lodgings with Henry Harrison (Kevin Kline), a ram-
bunctious bachelor of stout, unshakable beliefs and
unsavory personal habits. (He applies boot polish to
his ankles to ward off fleas and to compensate for a
lack of socks.) The story is adapted from the novel
by Jonathan Ames, and there is no doubt that Harri-
son retains the flavor of a literary conceit: the Falstaf-
fian throwback, with a touch of Shaw's Professor Hig-
gins, as rich in charisma as he is poor in cash. There
is even a ham-fisted attempt, at the start, to present
Ives as a modem Nick Carraway, preparing the way
for a figure of Gatsbyish splendor: Without the comic
skill and dedicated gusto of Kline, the movie, directed
by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, would
collapse for sure; it certainly founders when Harrison
leaves town and we are expected to take an interest
in the erotic plight of his protégé. This meshing of
perversity and Old World innocence doesn't work,
and you can sense most of the actors--even John C.
Reilly, in the role of a vocally challenged neighbor-
straining to keep up the basic level of eccentricity. The
most measured and melancholic perfonnance comes
from Patti D' Arbanville, as a dominatrix who means
no harm.-Anthony Lane (In wide release.)
FAREWELL
Christian Carion's fascinating spy thriller, loosely based
V)
!:!:!, on true events, is held together by the tense, infinitely
complex relationship between two men-Gregoriev
(Emir Kusturica), a middle-aged K.G.B. officer who
in 1981 convinces himself that he must betray his de-
caying country in order to save it, and Froment (Guil-
laume Canet), an ambitious young French engineer
working in Moscow. Gregoriev, disobeying every rule
of spycraft, deposits in the young man's hands the
most highly prized intelligence collected by the K.G.B.,
and Froment takes the material to the West, where it
winds up on the desks of François Mitterrand and
Ronald Reagan. Both stars are movie directors as well
as actors. Kusturica is the mesmerizing one here-his
Gregoriev is a daredevil, arrogant and generous at the
same time. But Canet is good, too, as the anxious,
calculating young man who gets caught up, against
all his instincts, in espionage. With Fred Ward (sound-
ing like Clint Eastwood) as Reagan, who is obsessed
with John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Val-
ance"; and Philippe Magnan as Mitterrand. In French,
English, and Russian.-D.D. (8/2110) (In wide release.)
HORROR OF DRACULA
The blood dripping from a vampire's lips was never
more erotic than in Christopher Lee's virile imper-
sonation of Count Dracula from 1958. It's unfortu-
nate that this first entry in the series produced by
Britain's Hammer Films sacrifices a sense of envel-
oping horror to B-movie concision (Jimmy Sangster
the film for ten years, and, as movie technology evolved,
he must have realized that he could do more and more
complex things. He wound up overcooking the idea.
He gives us dreams within dreams; he also stages ac-
tion within different levels of dreaming-deep, deeper,
and deepest, with matching physical movements played
out at each level, all of it cut together with Hans Zim-
mer's trombone-heavy music pounding us into near-
deafness, if not quite submission. There are extraor-
dinary sequences and a relatively minimal use of C.G.I.,
but the movie is nothing like a dream. It's more like
an excessively complicated action film with a foul load
of spoken exposition. And there's not a social, moral,
or spiritual theme in sight. Cinematography by Wally
Pfister. With Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt,
Tom Hardy, Ellen Page, and Dileep Rao.-D.D.
(7/26/10) (In wide release.)
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT
Lisa Cholodenko's film, set in California, stars An-
nette Bening and Julianne Moore as a gay couple who
live not in luxury but in a kind of harassed comfort,
with their two children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and
Laser (Josh Hutcherson). On their own initiative, the
children track down a man called Paul (Mark Ruf-
falo), their natural father. Long ago, he donated sperm;
not that his life has changed much, since he spends
his days having casual sex and running a funky res-
TABLES FOR TWO
KAZ AN NOU
53 Sixth Ave., between Dean and Bergen Sts., Brook-
lyn (718-938-3235)-If any neighborhood is in need
of a morale boost, it's the stretch between Flatbush
and Vanderbilt Avenues, bordering the Atlantic Yards
site. The last tenant took a multimillion-dollar pay-
out, Forest City Ratner's heavy equipment has moved
in, and Freddy's Bar has served its last beer. Just south
of the buildings awaiting demolition, though, Kaz
An Nou seems determined to bring a bit of Carib-
bean color and hope. (Its proximity to the Atlantic
Yards wrecking ball has caused some concern, but
the owners think they're safe, thanks to the Seventy-
eighth Precinct station house next door.)
The restaurant's name means "our house," and
eating here does have the feeling of home: the host,
waiter, and chef, Sebastien Aubert, owns and operates
the place with his wife, Michelle Lane, and minimal
other assistance. "We don't have any soup tonight,"
Aubert said one recent evening, by way of greeting.
"The entrée special is nice and simple, but it took all
my time." The menu is small, with the addition of one
or two specials each evening. (Aubert explains each
one at great length; if you were taking notes, you might
be able to re-create them yourself.) Accra--cod frit-
ters that are fried, offered in half of a calabash shell,
'I- I r
. I II'
\
511
;.
and dipped into a spicy aioli-are nearly always avail-
able. "I don't like to call them a special, because now
people expect them," Aubert said. The simplicity of the
project shows through in the repetition of a few key
ingredients. A stuffed-avocado appetizer, topped with
melted Emmentaler cheese, cuts the rich lipids with
woodsy mushrooms; the same cheese appears over a
gratin of plantains swimming in a soy béchamel, an
almost bizarre balancing act between sweet and salty.
The refreshing spiciness of a beet salad is offset by
mango; the fruit reappears in the sauce for a perfectly
cooked duck confit, with crisp skin and tender flesh.
Avocado salsa and goat cheese top the burger, com-
pensating for the lack of flavor in the overdone meat.
Even in the best of times, running a restaurant
is hard. "It's much easier to do this together," Au-
bert, who previously helmed Ivo & Lulu, in SoHo,
told some diners the other evening. "At least I have
someone else in it with me." (That someone else,
Lane, has kept her full-time job at a record com-
pany.) "This is like what my mom cooked," Aubert
said. "I love doing it." (Open Tuesdays through Sun-
days for dinner. Entrées $10-$15.)
-Andrea Thompson
wrote the unimaginative script) and that the direc-
tor, Terence Fisher, has what can only be called a
sledgehammer touch. But the picture does have the
beginnings of an overripe color scheme that, when
combined two years later with a Freudian farrago
of sexual terror, would ferment in the same team's
"Brides of Dracula." Peter Cushing's vampire hunter,
Van Helsing, has his own saturnine charisma; Mi-
chael Gough plays Holmwood with a stiff upper
face; and Miles Malleson brings a welcome bit of
comic relief as an undertaker who jokes about his
work.-Michael Sragow (BAM; Aug. 7.)
INCEPTION
An astonishment, a considerable feat of engineering,
and, finally, a folly. A team for hire, headed by a dream
thief (Leonardo DiCaprio), enters the dreams of a tar-
geted victim and plants ideas there that the victim
will think, upon awakening, are his own. The writer-
director, Christopher Nolan, has been contemplating
taurant. Now he is invited to join the family circle-
first to have dinner, then to hang out with Laser, and
last, secretly and very unwisely, to make hay with one
of the mothers. Cholodenko has a fine, astute feeling
for the rhythms of gaucherie and social mishap, and
a particular sympathy for the plight of the two teen-
agers (who seem ever more deserving of our sympa-
thy than the adults do); for some reason, however, the
movie sours and stalls in the final reel, opting for a
strange vindictiveness-look at Paul, locked out and
leering through a window at the good folk huddled
within. He's not a murderer, you want to protest, just
an easy lay.-A.L. (7/12 & 19/10) (In wide release.)
LEBANON
A harrowing experiment that works so well that it's
hell to sit through. In June, 1982, four very young Is-
raelis in a tank enter a town in Lebanon that has been
bombed by the Israeli Air Force. They are told noth-
ing of their mission, and the movie itself provides zero
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 9, 2010 15